Endless Night (The Guild Wars Book 3) Page 18

  She gave him a cold stare. “I expect you think I’m foolish to stay here.”

  “Well, I…” Jenkins stomped his feet in frustration. This wasn’t how he imagined it would play out. “Yes. You are being a fool. They hurt you, Hopper. That’s all the data you need. Come away with me. Now!”

  She dropped her gaze to the carpet. “The applied research is about to begin. It was to be conducted from Station 5, but my guards have been disturbed. They whisper something about an old enemy discovering them. They want to relocate me to a darker place, away from observation. Where I can complete my work in peace.”

  “Once they have you, they will never let you go. Once you are no longer useful, then they will kill you.”

  “I know. But the opportunity to apply this research. I can’t let it go easily.”

  “The owner of my company is fabulously rich. I mean, so rich, there aren’t enough zeros in the galaxy to express her wealth.”

  “Talk seriously, Jenkins.”

  “My apologies. She is obscenely wealthy, and she could fund your research. Do you know when you are to be moved?”

  “No, but I suspect it could be very soon.”

  “Then I shall engineer your exit immediately. Whether you are willing or not.” Jenkins commed Betty. “I need help bringing in Hopper. Are Branco and Sun back yet?”

  “No. Still on Crazy Notion, and I’m not about to disturb the love bugs.”

  “I think the term is lovebirds.”

  “No. Definitely love bugs. Whereas you and Hopper are love snacks.”

  “I do wish you wouldn’t keep referring to me as food.”

  “You are oversensitive, Jenkins. Some of my best friends are food.”

  Jenkins broke the link. Aliens were so undependable sometimes. He would just have to use his power of persuasion on Hopper.

  “If you stay with them, I’ll never see you again.” He drooped. “I’ll never…assist you in your work.

  “You would do that for me?” she clicked in wonder. “You would be my assistant?”

  “I would,” he lied, though he did long to be Hopper’s equal partner. He’d never considered anyone his equal before, not yet even Zarbi.

  The door started to open.

  Both Jeha fled into the sleeping annex.

  “They mustn’t see you,” she cried softly. “Quick, under the bed.”

  The bed was high off the ground, in the Jeha fashion. He clambered up and hung onto the underside of the mattress. Unhelpful memories flashed in his mind of the ecstasies he’d enjoyed on the other side of this bed.

  “Where are you, brain bug?” asked a Goka voice.

  “In here, sir,” Hopper replied.

  From his hiding place, Jenkins saw the lower half of Goka legs walk into the annex.

  Brain Bug? A bit rich coming from a brainless bug like you. Just wait until Betty sinks her fangs into you.

  “We’re shifting location. Tell us what’s in this cabin that you need for your work. Anything we don’t take is left behind for good, so think carefully.”

  Endless Night.

  His pinplants supplied the answer to the question Who were they? he’d been asking subconsciously ever since Hopper had talked of the Mobius strip tattoos. Commander Flkk’Sss had issued a ship-wide security directive about them only the day before. Security wasn’t Jenkins’ specialty, so he hadn’t wasted his valuable time reading it.

  The Endless Night. Jenkins had encountered them once before. Killers. Pirates. Murderers. Slavers. He’d encountered the heinous gang three years ago at the same time as meeting the two sisters. The memory petrified him, making him curl up inside. He screamed inwardly to keep calm, but he couldn’t help himself. Cowardice was deep in his nature.

  His manipulative limbs began to peel away from the mattress, folding away inside his carapace as he curled up. One by one.

  He lost his grip and fell to the ground, rolling out from under the bed until he came to rest against Goka feet.

  “Well, well,” said a Zuul voice. “Who’s your little friend, brain bug?”

  “My lover.”

  Jenkins almost fainted with delight at Hopper’s words. Then he curled so hard in fear that he couldn’t breathe.

  “Kill it!”

  Jenkins squealed.

  “No. We’ll take him too. If you don’t come up with the good ideas, brain bug—or if you misbehave again in any way—we’ll hurt your lover real bad.”

  “I promise,” pleaded Hopper. “Just don’t hurt him. Please. He’s harmless.”

  “We won’t…So long as you behave…”

  Jenkins felt himself being carried away. He was still curled up, but he summoned an unexpected reservoir of resolve, because Hopper depended on him being brave. He couldn’t unwrap himself, but he uncurled his mind and used his pinplants to link to Betty’s comm unit.

  The waves of terror made complex thought impossible. He managed to transmit only a single word before succumbing to mind-scrambling dread.

  “Help!”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Betty was bored.

  Tortantula minds were complex organs capable of extending into far more avenues of cognition than most people realized. Betty had often surprised herself with what her brain was capable of, especially after she’d eaten Tatterjee and had to operate on her own.

  There was a gulf of difference, though, between what Betty was capable of when pushed and what she wanted to do.

  Sitting in an empty compartment monitoring comms was the kind of mental activity that should rightfully be left for a Flatar. Or a Jeha. Or a Human. Anyone but her, really. Even though she’d been forced to acknowledge to the rest of her team that she was best suited to act as reserve on this mission.

  It didn’t mean she liked being stuck here.

  Perhaps she should do a little commanding and coordinating while she still could.

  Yes, that sounded better.

  When Endless Night had been discovered on Station 5, Sun felt compelled to explain their little gang’s fun to Mishkan-Ijk. They’d been trooped in front of the Goltar commander. Betty assumed they were to be executed for disobeying some silly rule, but Mishkan-Ijk told them to take precautions and finish the business and leave the Endless Night to him and Top.

  The way he’d spoken made no sense to Betty. It was almost as if Betty’s Bitches were Mishkan-Ijk’s idea in the first place.

  Then the Goltar had taken Betty aside and said he held her personally responsible for the safety of Sun, Branco, and Jenkins. Mishkan-Ijk explained the consequences that would follow if she failed, and he painted a picture of a very unpleasant death.

  Life was so much simpler when it had been Tatterjee and her in their original assault company.

  She realized that simplicity was gone forever.

  Branco was supposed to be in charge of this adventure to rescue Jenkins’ little wriggly girlfriend, but his head no longer functioned correctly. So, Sun acted like she was in charge. But they were Betty’s Bitches, and she was Betty.

  And Mishkan-Ijk had told her that she was the responsible one.

  Which meant Betty was boss.

  She commed the major, “Sun, report your status immediately.”

  “We’ve tightened our grip on Crazy Notion’s surveillance systems but haven’t seen anything yet. Branco and I are alone in the hold with our exfil options all green. How about Jenkins? Is he in yet?”

  “The snackling entered a short while ago. No reports yet.”

  “Don’t make me tell you again, Betty. He doesn’t like you calling him that. It frightens him, and when Jenkins is scared, he can’t do the useful things we need him to with his mind.”

  “I shall take it under advisement, Major. In fact, he’s pinging me now. I’ll ask him. Oh…”

  “What’s he saying?”

  “Help!”

  Betty erupted out the door and charged along the short length of passageway separating her from Hopper’s qua
rters. On the way, she reached into her equipment pouch and brought out the complicated device Jenkins had given her. It was to trick the portal into opening. The difficulty was in remembering how to use it.

  For once, though, the universe smiled upon her and the door iris opened of its own volition. A Goka emerged, followed by a Zuul and a Blevin, each carrying a curled-up Jeha.

  Betty flipped the Goka up and stabbed a leg through it in midair, spearing it into the bulkhead. She pulled her leg free and used the still-stuck Goka corpse as a club to beat the Blevin into a bloody pulp.

  The Zuul escaped, scampering away down the passageway.

  Betty ran off in pursuit. A short while later, she leapt at the Zuul, knocking her over and biting through her spine as they fell to the deck.

  The female was young and healthy, and Betty had worked up a monstrous hunger. Now that she felt unhurried and unthreatened, Betty gorged on the Zuul’s juices, toying with her food so she left behind a single piece of deflated hide on the deck. Perhaps someone would mistake it for a garment and try it on.

  Then she remembered the Jeha she was supposed to be rescuing and marched back to Hopper’s room, cursing the annoying Goka who was making her gait sound all wrong because its stupid corpse wouldn’t come off her leg.

  The two Jeha were still there, unharmed. Still curled up, though not as tightly as before.

  Betty blinked at them, trying different combinations of eyes, but it was no use. Stupid Jeha. They all looked the same to her.

  She snacked on the Blevin while pondering her conundrum. She was supposed to be rescuing Hopper, but how could she when females were undistinguishable from males? Tortantula were far more practical in their distinctions between sexes. No one could mistake her for a puny Tort male.

  Betty walked back to the least curled Jeha and dipped her head until a detail eye was almost touching.

  “Come out please,” she told it.

  The alien extended scores of limbs and backed away.

  Betty decided the results were inconclusive. It could equally well be Jenkins or Hopper. Neither of them seemed capable of speech.

  The other Jeha was curled up into a cylinder again. Betty gave it a gentle tap with one leg, which sent it rolling along the deck until it hit the bulkhead with a cracking impact.

  “Jenkins, are you in there?” she shouted at the tube of chitin.

  It didn’t speak. Maybe she’d tapped it too hard? Other than a clever mind and wriggling antennae and legs there was no substance to the silly things.

  “Jenkins?”

  It unrolled only slightly, but then she felt a comm ping in her head. “Betty, save Hopper.”

  “Don’t worry. Your crunchy fancy is—Entropy!”

  Betty had been so focused on Jenkins that she hadn’t noticed the other one scamper away. Her rear-facing eyes saw Hopper disappear around a turn in the corridor. Betty scooped up Jenkins with one leg and ran after the other snackling.

  It wasn’t easy. One of Betty’s legs had been bitten off during the Raknar job, one was booted with a Goka corpse that kept banging into her neighboring limbs, and one was occupied carrying Midnight Sun’s chief engineer. Betty was unbalanced. In any case, her prey had many more legs than her.

  She breathed deeply into her lung and stretched every sinew and coupling in her exoskeleton until she caught the pesky little thing. Hopper slowed to turn a corner, and Betty seized the moment, lunging at her target. The Jeha dodged away, and Betty slammed into the bulkhead.

  Hopper crawled up and around the overhead, heading back in the direction of her quarters.

  Betty flung herself around and meant to give chase, but she was already too late. She snapped her jaws at the sight of Hopper’s rear segments disappearing into a ventilation shaft.

  Stupid small things. Jeha were forever disappearing into holes where Betty couldn’t follow. Almost as annoying as elSha.

  She put Jenkins down and gave the engineer a few moments to unwrap himself.

  “We need to save Hopper,” he told her.

  “She went into a hole. Betty can’t follow.”

  “She’s screaming for help. Can’t you hear that?”

  Betty tilted her head and reassessed the noises in the corridor. “Oh, that. I thought I was hearing bubbles rattling a pipe.”

  Now that she had the sound prominently in her head, the direction was clear: down the starboard spray of passageways heading aft.

  She thundered off in pursuit, the Goka corpse still stuck onto one leg. Soon, the rattling grew louder. Then she heard other sounds: thumping feet, shouted orders, weapons charging.

  There was something else too, in the air.

  Besquith.

  Her palps touched together into a smile. This was more like it!

  As she turned a corner, two laser beams tried to burn a hole in her, but they deflected off her exoskeleton armor. She pounced, ripping the head off the four-armed Gliboonian who’d fired both weapons.

  Beyond, Hopper was caught in the grip of a male Besquith who turned and snarled at Betty. He turned away briefly, just long enough to throw the Jeha into the waiting hands of a gaggle of smaller humanoids.

  Betty ignored the latter. For the moment, it was all about her and the Besquith.

  Her enemy was wearing hardened hybrid ceramic armor from head to toe. It was high quality equipment. On each shoulder was a black emblem bearing a Mobius strip.

  Endless Night.

  The Besquith fired a burst of shots with a handgun that stung her exoskeleton fiercely.

  She feinted a strike with a foreleg, whipping it back just before connecting with her opponent’s arm. But the Besquith was very fast, raking fearsome claws down her leg and drawing blood and pain. Betty spun about, waving the ragged Goka corpse in front of the Besquith. Her opponent was confused for an instant.

  It was all she needed. Following through with her spin she pushed off the deck and into the Besquith, toppling him over and landing on him with the enormous meat of her thorax.

  He roared and raked her underbelly with wicked claws.

  She shrieked her pain and anger.

  Her victory was inevitable. Her vulnerable underside was horribly exposed, but the Besquith was pinned beneath her weight. His armor was tough, but Betty bit into a patch on his upper thigh with fangs powered by meter-long muscles that delivered two tons per square millimeter at their tips.

  There was no contest.

  With the Besquith still gouging her belly, his armor gave way with a high-pitched squeak. She reached her fangs inside to bite off one leg. Without waiting to empty her venom sac, she bit off the other.

  Besquith arterial spray liberally redecorated the passageway.

  Her opponent made more raking attacks, but they were weak and getting weaker.

  Betty sank her fangs inside her prey’s lower torso and sucked out some juice to restore a little energy. Then she left her food to die and charged after Hopper.

  The remaining Endless Night rabble and their captive had escaped the warren of luxury cabins and made it into an inter-deck atrium. Its Tri-V décor wove an illusion of being inside thick pink and yellow clouds churned by gentle winds.

  Her prey wasn’t racing for the ramps or elevators. Her prey wasn’t acting as prey was supposed to.

  They had advanced twenty meters into the atrium and then turned, taunting her.

  It was a trap.

  Whipped on by her fury, she threw herself even faster at her prey.

  She flinched as she felt tapping on the top of her head. She tried looking up with her peripheral eyes, but there was nothing there. Nothing alive.

  Betty knew who it was. It was the ghost of Tatterjee rapping her head with the grip of his XT-12 pistol, as he often had when she did something he thought particularly stupid.

  It was a trap.

  She skittered, slamming on the brakes.

  A pressure door slammed down into place, sealing the atrium off from the passageway.

  Betty smash
ed into the barrier headfirst, her momentum lifting her thorax up to slap against the sturdy barrier.

  The door barely dented.

  As she lay there, stunned, she heard a tiny clicking voice. “Are you all right?”

  It was Jenkins, trying to navigate a passage along the port bulkhead that didn’t require stepping in Besquith blood. He kept his antennae pointed at the previous owner of that blood who lay on the deck, still rattling his way to the afterlife.

  “Of course I am not all right,” Betty snapped back. “My prey has evaded me. For now.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Betty ceased her futile banging on the reinforced portal and tilted her head to regard the little Jeha through the eyes on the left side of her head.

  With Hopper stolen from under her palps, Jenkins thought their mission a failure. It was merely a setback, though an entropy-cursed annoying one. Were they not named Betty’s Bitches? She was Betty, and they would prevail.

  “Keep the faith, bitch,” she told the foolish little creature. “I have a plan.”

  The Jeha had no answer to that. No matter, Betty contacted her infiltration team.

  “Major, good news.”

  “Wait…” The Human went quiet for several seconds. “That’s better. I needed to get deeper into concealment. Go ahead. What’s your news?”

  “Endless Night has seized Hopper and is removing her to an unknown destination.”

  “Endless Night?” Major Sun spat out a flurry of curses Betty’s translator could make no sense of. “How is any of that good, Betty?”

  “Because if we are right that Hopper is connected with Crazy Notion, then they may bring her to the ship. A ship you are currently aboard and keeping under close observation. If you are able to verify the connection, then we can bring a team of CASPers to smash the heads of Crazy Notion’s crew. Only then can we return Jenkins to his regular level of anxiety so he may locate the Riderless Tort.”

  “Betty, you know…that’s actually brilliant.”

  “Damn right, bitch.”

  “Don’t push it, Trooper.”

  “Sorry, Major. Should I inform the captain?”